From sophisticated wine...

...comes sophisticated dreams. Hello everybody from Papigo, Greece. The air is nice in the mountains, very fresh and dry and clean. The wine is also dry and clean. And now I will dive in.

The sky is always robins' egg blue (verging on lavender at night), and when the sun goes down, the snow--just above my head--turns pink. I can walk in any direction and it is guaranteed to be a beautiful day for a walk. The views are socks-knockers every time. As for the town of Papigo, it is 100 percent made of stone. Very quaint. Almost too quaint. As with fairytales, or gooey couples in public, I want to barf a little, even as I appreciate them. It's sort of labrythine in design, but it's way too small to get lost in. Or, it depends on the definition of lost. The time it takes to find your way back (to where?) is small. And I like to discover Papigo in the dark. There are about 12 street lights--dots in the center--and afterward the cobbles fall into darkness. At each tip of the village the cobble road turns to a dirt road, but before it does there is a little circle of cobbles separating the village from the rest of the world. This creates a Brigadoon-like quality. Again, barf. If it is possible to feel inside a place, it is how I feel here.

I'm working at an inn and restuarant, and the social situation is all at once strange and exhausting and hilarious. The inn is owned by two brothers who don't speak a lick of English. As we know, I don't speak a lick of Greek (we can both say 'thank you', 'good morning', 'good night', and 'I don't understand' in each others' respective languages, and each day we gain a few more words). Kostas is shy and awkward around me, but Spyros is always winking and making me espresso and putting strong alcoholic beverages in front of me, some of which I really don't want. There is also a Polish woman named Gosha living and working here. She's been here for five years. She learned Greek when she came, but she speaks very little English. Her story is a little crazy. She came to work in Greece through an agency. When she arrived in Athens, they sent her to an address, a whorehouse. So she went back to the agency to complain, and they ditched her, so she found work cleaning, and then eventually made her way here. I know this because tonight there was an Athenian visiting the restaurant--an old friend of Spyros--and he told me. Spyros is funny, he has a bad sense of style/use of hair gel like an Italian man, but he is always watching the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, so I know he is more intelligent than he looks.

Gosha is dieting. Most especially, she's not eating bread, so we're not exactly kindred spirits. When I first came we were having a really hard time communicating. In the beginning, she was very abrasive with me, and I took it personally. There are always other ways to communicate besides language, and I didn't understand why she wouldn't enter these games with me. But then I realized that even though Spyros and Kostas are always around, it is really Gosha who is in charge, who does all the cooking and the cleaning (which is a lot). As someone on holiday, coming to work for my bread at a picturesque mountain inn, I came with ideas about what that should feel and look like. I didn't realize I had ideas, but I did. But this is not Gosha's holiday. This is her job. She misses Poland. She misses her sisters. She misses speaking Polish. Actually, we made a new development yesterday, because even though there are always people around, I am isolated, since no one here speaks English. The first few days I was quiet and unhappy. And then I realized that it didn't matter if no one understood me, because if I spoke, I would feel better. And so I started sounding like a crazy person, but Gosha caught on. And since I don't understand Greek or Polish, she can speak Polish to me, and it doesn't matter. It's very cathartic.